Baker who abused goddaughter gets butchered in revenge, but sympathetic jury acquits her of murder

Josephine Terranova was a sweet, innocent girl from the old country, until years of abuse put voices in her head and a butcher's knife in her hands.

On the night of Feb. 22, 1906, she used the weapon to murder two people, Gaetano Riggio and his wife, Concetta. They were kin - her uncle and aunt - and he was her godfather. They had generously opened their home to the girl when her widowed mother could no longer care for her.

They were, on the night of the slayings, unarmed.

Yet, by the end of Terranova's trial, the general consensus would be that the couple had it coming.

Seven years earlier, the Riggios had offered the girl an escape from her bleak life in Italy. She was born Josephine Pullare, in 1889 in Sicily, the daughter of a man known as the town drunk. Papa was out of the picture, dead, by the time his daughter was 4 years old. Desperate to save at least one of her eight children, her mother sent Josephine across the ocean to rich relatives in the new world, the Riggios, who owned a prosperous bakery in the Bronx.

Things looked bright when the 9-year-old girl stepped off the boat at Ellis Island. The couple met her with hugs and kisses, and promised her a beautiful life.

That life turned out to be a horror. The Riggios forced her to become their servant, responsible for all the chores in the family's boarding house, which sometimes had as many as 16 guests. She was given little food. When she got sick, her medicine was a beating.

Within two years, her uncle, with the apparent approval of her aunt, took the young girl to his bed. To keep her silent, he used terror.

This went on for years, until Josephine's mother managed to scrape together enough money to bring the whole family to America. Unaware of the abuse, Mama sent another child, Josephine's younger sister, into the same den of sorrow.

In January 1906, Riggio agreed to release the older girl to a suitor, Joseph Terranova, a building contractor from Brooklyn. Terranova, 25, had set eyes on Josephine six months earlier, and was smitten by the girl, who, despite her circumstances, had matured into a beauty.

The couple married in a civil ceremony on Jan. 28, 1906, and, as was the custom, she went back to her uncle's house. There, contrary to custom, she spent the night in her uncle's bed.

Days later, the newlyweds celebrated their union with a church ceremony and feast. During the festivities, Riggio took the groom aside, and said that Josephine was "no good," and that he should ask his bride for details after the party.

That night, in their home in Brooklyn, the groom demanded an explanation of Riggio's strange words. Josephine told him the truth.

Horrified, he declared that he could not be married to a fallen woman, and left the apartment. She stayed for nearly two weeks, alone and hysterical, watching images of her uncle drift across the walls. Then the voices started.

ON FEB. 22, carrying a butcher's knife, she returned to what she called her "penal home at the bakery."

Riggio greeted her with a sneer. "Ah ha. I knew you would be back," he said.

She responded with the knife, which struck with deadly accuracy.

Shrieking, his wife rushed to help him, but she too fell to Josephine's fury. The uncle died two days later, his wife a week after that, at Fordham hospital.

By the time police arrived, Josephine had vanished. They tracked her down three days later, hiding in her mother's house. She confessed to the killings. "I did it," she said, "to wipe out the stain on my honor."

Prosecutors at her trial, which opened on May 14, 1906, said there was no question the killings were worthy of death in the electric chair. But the defense insisted that the slender "black-eyed beauty" suffered from inherited madness and had been driven to murder by her uncle's betrayal. Josephine's frail, ailing mother came to the stand, supported by two of her other daughters, to tell the court of generations of drunkards on Josephine's father's side, and a history of epileptic fits in all her children.

Josephine herself helped make the case by insisting that the spirits of her aunt and uncle were visiting her in her cell, in the form of a worm and a butterfly.

Still, to prove her insanity wasn't an act, scientific experts were called in. They subjected Josephine to three days of gruesome tests, including pinpricks, hot irons, lighted matches, and electric shocks.

But after it all, no one could say with certainty whether she was sane or not.

The jury, composed exclusively of married men with daughters, took 17 minutes to find her innocent. Newspapers reported that the verdict upheld the "unwritten law," in which the violated woman was justified in seeking revenge.

Despite the acquittal, Terranova immediately told newspapers he was seeking a divorce. Josephine said she was headed straight for a convent.

Instead, the couple reconciled, settled in San Francisco and raised five children. She lived a quiet, ordinary life, until her death, at age 91, in 1981.